Stirred Not Shaken: Facile Production of High-Quality, High-Concentration Graphene Aqueous Suspensions Assisted by a Protein

A simple method to produce record concentrations (up to 10 mg mL–1) of high-quality aqueous graphene suspensions by using an ordinary benchtop magnetic stirrer is reported. The shear rates employed here are almost 10 times less than those in previous reports, and graphene is efficiently separated from unexfoliated graphite during the synthesis. Systematic optimization of synthesis parameters, such as pH, protein concentration, temperature, stirrer speed, and volume of solution, afforded efficient conversion (100%) of graphite to graphene–aqueous suspensions. The synthesis is readily scaled-up with a continuous flow reactor where the graphene is produced and separated 24/7, with little or no human intervention. Raman spectroscopy confirmed little to no sp3 or oxidative defects, and that the graphene nanosheets consisted of three to five layers. The graphene suspensions were coated on aluminum and tested for thermal conductivity applications. The thermal conductivity of our graphene sample was calculated to be 684 W m–1 K–1, a value greater than that of a commercial sample. The activation energy measured for shear exfoliation by stirring was found to be over 45 billion times smaller than the corresponding thermal activation energy, affording physical insight into the process. We hypothesize that stirring selectively populates translational states that are necessary for exfoliation and thus requires far less energy than conventional exfoliation methods, where the energy is uniformly distributed among all available modes. Therefore, an efficient, convenient, and inexpensive method for graphene production in limited-resource settings is reported here.